The Artificial Wash

Rubble decorates the bulldozed slope.
A ditch at the bottom will funnel
The run-off from occasional rains.

All this was planned. Bought, drawn up, approved.
Human bodies worked in teams along
With their heavy machines to make this.

It will be the margin of a new
Subdivision in a land that keeps
Subdividing, in a world that keeps

Subdividing, although not always
According to plan. The signature,
However, is not in the planning,

Nor the execution of the plan,
Nor even in the lives that will live
Beside the bulldozed, gravel-filled slope.

Look at the stones themselves, the rubble.
Despite all the ruins and fossils
Earth preserves, most of the crust’s like this,

Heaped masses of the monotonous,
The ever-so-slightly divergent,
The boring rubble that looks like rocks,

That could as well be single pixels
Repeated in this picture, that let
A plan say something uniform here.

That’s the signature. The strange dullness.
The universe is made of repeats
So nearly perfect they’re bulk. You yawn.